Tuesday, September 22, 2015

AT MIDNIGHT 9/22 – 9/23, HILLARY CLINTON’S E-MAILS WERE AMONG THE TOP STORIES FOR THE GOOGLE SEARCH: “HILLARY CLINTON NEWS”REPORT OF FBI’S RECOVERY OF “PRIVATE” AND “WORK RELATED” E-MAILS FROM HILLARY CLINTON’S PERSONAL SERVER MAKES THE WHOLE E-MAIL STORY “NEW” AGAINTEAM-HILLARY’S RESPONSE OF “CONTINUING TO COOPERATE WITH THE FBI” IS - AT BEST - TEPIDAT THE SAME TIME, THE DES MOINES REGISTER RAISES ANOTHER PROBLEMATIC DISCREPANCY IN HILLARY’S NARRATIVE ABOUT HER E-MAILS – AND HILLARY IS UNABLE TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT

Hillary Clinton’s E-mails are again back at the top of the news. This time it’s all about FBI investigative technicians being able to “recover” at least some of the E-Mails that the Democratic Presidential candidate had said she erased when she first address the E-mails issue back in March of this year.

MY MOST RECENT GOOGLE SEARCH

According to the folks at Google, these were the top responses to an inquiry for “Hillary Clinton News”:
“... Clinton disputes report of new email discrepancy – DesMoinesRegister.com - 2 hours ago
Another apparent discrepancy has arisen in what Hillary Clinton has said about her emails.
Investigators Find Emails Hillary Clinton Said Were Erased – New York Times - 2 hours ago
FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server – Bloomberg - 5 hours ago....” (See “Hillary Clinton News Google” 9/23/15, Google [https://www.google.com/search?q=Hillary+Clinton+News&oq=Hillary+Clinton+News&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i65l3j0.7718j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8]).

NY TIMES COVERAGE

According to a report by Schmidt at the New York Times — “WASHINGTON — F.B.I. investigators have recovered work-related and personal emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton said had been deleted from the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state, according to two government officials....” ( See “Investigators Find Emails Hillary Clinton Said Were Erased” by Michael S. Schmidt, 9/22/15 [9/23/15 print editions], NY Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/us/politics/investigators-find-emails-hillary-clinton-said-were-erased.html?_r=0]).

In addition to crediting Bloomberg News for breaking to story, the Schmidt-Times article went on to say, in part, the following: “.... The F.B.I. is looking into how classified information was handled in connection with the account. It was not clear whether the entire trove of roughly 60,000 emails had been found on the server, but one official said it had not been very hard for the F.B.I. to recover the messages.... The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation. The recovery of the emails was first reported by Bloomberg News.... Mrs. Clinton and her lawyer have said that the server’s contents were deleted last year after her aides determined which emails were personal and which were work-related and should be provided to the State Department. In March, a House committee asked Mrs. Clinton to give the server to a third party to determine whether she had turned over all of the work-related emails....”

BLOOMBERG NEWS COVERAGE

The original story broke on the Bloomberg News site with this: “The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.... The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.... The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. The probe probably will take at least several more months, according to the person, who described the matter on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing and deals with sensitive information.... A review by Clinton and her aides determined that about half of the 60,000 e-mails she exchanged during her four-year tenure as secretary of state were of a personal nature, the presidential candidate has said.... Those e-mails, she said, mostly dealt with planning for Chelsea’s wedding, yoga routines and condolence messages.... Clinton said the personal e-mails were deleted from the server and her staff turned over paper copies of the remaining work-related e-mails in December to the State Department for processing and archiving. The FBI obtained Clinton’s server from the Colorado-based company managing it....” (See “FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server” by Wilber Del Quentin, 9/22/15, Bloomberg News [http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-22/fbi-said-to-recover-personal-e-mails-from-hillary-clinton-server]).

ALSO ADDITIONAL COVERAGE OF THE FBI STORY IN RIGHT WING MEDIA

In addition to the material discussed above, several “Republican,” conservative and right-leaning outlets have also jumped on this news lead about the FBI’s recovery of the Hillary’s deleted E-mails....

The Des Moines Register’s report relates to a completely different story, which is also quite problematic for the Democrat front-runner for the presidency. According to Jennifer Jacobs report in the Register, “Another apparent discrepancy has arisen in what Hillary Clinton has said about her emails.... When The Des Moines Register asked her about the latest twist in the private server saga on Tuesday, she said she had no new answers.... Just before Clinton sat down for a 105-minute meeting with the Register's editorial board, the Washington Post posted a news story that said the State Department's request for her emails was ‘prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system.’... That contradicts what Clinton has been saying, which is that agency officials asked her for her emails as part of a benign, general record-keeping effort to sweep up ‘everything from other secretaries of state, not just me,’ as she said Sunday.... (See “Clinton disputes report of new email discrepancy” by Jennifer Jacobs, 9/22/15, The Des Moines Register [http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2015/09/22/clinton-on-conflicting-explanations-about-her-emails-i-cant-answer-that/72651534/]).

This is where the rubber meets the road – and where Hillary has a real problem: “.... After the editorial board meeting, a Register reporter asked Clinton if she could explain the discrepancy between her characterization of why she turned over the emails and the State Department's.... ‘I don't know that. I can't answer that,’ Clinton answered. ‘All I know is that they sent the same letter to everybody. That's my understanding.’...”

7 comments:

CBS NEWS REPORT ON THE FBI-CLINTON E-MAILS STORY ADDED TO GOOGLE’S LIST OF TOP INTERNET RESPONSES TO INQUIRY: “HILLARY CLINTON NEWS”

CBS mentioned both of the items mentioned in the main post in its televised report linked in the article cited in this comment: ( See “Report: FBI pulls deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's server” [with video link to CBS TV coverage of subject matter] by Paula Reid, HannahFraser-Chanpong, 9/22/15, CBS News [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-fbi-pulls-deleted-emails-from-hillary-clintons-server/]).

CBS opened its textual coverage with the following: “.... The FBI has salvaged work and personal emails thought to have been deleted from the private server Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state, Bloomberg first reported Tuesday night.... The FBI has been trying figure out how many classified emails Clinton had on her server and how they got there. The agency is concerned about whether Hillary Clinton's private email system exposed any classified information, and if so, the extent of exposure, as well as why it occurred....”

And it concluded with this: “.... While the discovery of the deleted mails on Clinton's server is a new development, it is largely incremental. Computer analysts have always expected that the FBI's technical experts would likely be able to recover the information they sought from Clinton's server.... What remains to be disclosed is the number and nature of the emails they're able to extract from the server.”

UPDATE: THE “NEW YORK TIMES HAMMERS HILLARY CLINTON WITH TWO BIG HUMA ABEDIN RELATED STORIES” EDITION

NY TIMES REPORTS ON TWO STORIES TIED TO HILLARY CLINTON’S E-MAILS AND ALSO TO ONE OF HILLARY’S CLOSEST AIDES, HUMA ABEDIN

ONE OF THE TIMES ARTICLES DEALS WITH HILLARY’S DIRECT INVOLVEMENT IN HUMA ABEDIN’S SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT ARRANGEMENT, WHERE SHE SIMULTANEOUSLY HELD THREE POSITIONS

THE OTHER ARTICLE TELLS ABOUT TWO OF HRC'S AIDES, ONE BEING HUMA ABEDIN, WHO FORWARDED SENSITIVE INFORMATION TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE WITHOUT PROPER CLASSIFICATION MARKINGS & ON AN NON-SECURE E-MAIL SYSTEM

The NY Times directly tied Hillary Clinton to a scheme that allowed Huma Abedin to have a special employment status whereby she could hold three jobs simultaneously. According to the report of Nicholas Confessore in the NY Times — “Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly involved in arranging a new government position for a top aide that allowed the aide to begin working for a private consulting firm while remaining at the State Department, according to documents released on Thursday....” ( See “Hillary Clinton Personally Signed Off on Job Change for Huma Abedin” by Nicholas Confessore, 9/24/15, NY Times/ First Draft [http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/09/24/hillary-clinton-personally-signed-off-on-job-change-for-huma-abedin/]).

In the middle of his coverage, Mr. Confessore made a special point of mentioning this: “.... In an interview earlier this month, after the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump attacked Mrs. Abedin, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Mrs. Clinton whether it was fair to question Mrs. Abedin’s taking a salary from both the State Department and Teneo.... ‘Do you think he had a point in raising the question of whether it was appropriate for her to be taking a State Department salary and also be paid by an outside company closely associated with your husband and by you?’ Ms. Mitchell asked.... ‘Well, you know, I was not directly involved in that,’ Mrs. Clinton replied. ‘But everything that she did was approved, under the rules, as they existed, by the State Department.’...”

The other article dealt with the FBI’s close scrutiny of E-mails by two of HRC’s top aides while she was the Secretary of State, Huma Abedin and Timmy T. Davis. According to the Times — “The email described a deteriorating situation in Libya, with snipers shooting people in the streets as rebels tried to unseat President Muammar el-Qaddafi and worried American diplomats in the midst of a “phased checkout” from Benghazi. It arrived in the private email account of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, one Sunday morning in April 2011, with unforeseen consequences.... The Libyan dispatch, written by an aide to Mrs. Clinton and then forwarded to her by Huma Abedin, one of her top advisers, should have been considered classified....” ( See “Hillary Clinton Email Inquiry Weighs if Aides Erred at ‘Send’” by Eric Lipton & Michael S. Schmidt, 924/15 [in print editions of the NY Times 0/25/15], NY Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/us/politics/hillary-clinton-email-inquiry-weighs-if-aides-erred-at-send.html?_r=0]).

The Times made note of the fact that Hillary Clinton spokesperson, Nick Merrill, acknowledged that Mr. Davis sent the E-mail to Ms. Abedin and other top aides to Mrs. Clinton; and that Ms. Abedin then forwarded it to Mrs. Clinton. While Ms. Abedin would have no clear reason to presume this information was classified, Mr. Davis could be found at fault for distributing the information in an unclassified setting. Mr. Davis, who is still at the State Department, did not respond to a request for comment by the NY Times.

NOW BREITBART NEWS IS REPORTING THAT IT LOOKS LIKE HILLARY MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE COMMITTED PERJURY — IN AS MUCH AS, ONE OF THE APPARENTLY CONTRADICTED STATEMENTS WAS MADE UNDER OATH AND DELIVERED TO A FEDERAL COURT IN A FOIA CASE

According, to the folks at Breitbart, “Who ever knows how, or if, “the law” will apply to Democrat royalty? It sure looks as if Hillary Clinton committed perjury with her sworn statement that she turned over all of the official correspondence from her secret email server, and deleted only the yoga routines, cookie recipes, wedding reception plans, and so forth.... What the Associated Press reported on Friday afternoon sounds like the “game over” moment Democrats have been fearing since the Clinton email scandal came to a boil....” (See “EMAILS BETWEEN HILLARY CLINTON AND PETRAEUS DISCOVERED, CONTRADICTING HER SWORN STATEMENT” by John Hayward, 9/25/15, Breitbart News [http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/25/emails-hillary-clinton-petraeus-discovered-contradicting-sworn-statement/]).

After quoting a report from the AP, the Heyward-Breitbart article went on to state this: “.... Hillary Clinton didn’t just “claim” she turned over all of her work-related emails. She signed a sworn statement to that effect in August, under penalty of perjury, and submitted it to a federal court. It’s the same statement her top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills refused to sign.... Many observers thought the proverbial Other Shoe would drop on Clinton when the FBI started recovering deleted emails from the server she thought was wiped clean, but it doesn’t sound like we’ve even gotten to that closet full of Other Shoes yet. The AP report says this previously undisclosed string of Clinton emails was ‘first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department’s inspector general.’... State Department spokesman John Kirby said these emails were received ‘in the last several days’ and confirmed they ‘were not previously in the possession of the department.’ He added that the State Department has forwarded the documents to Congress....”

ALSO >>> ANOTHER<<< APPARENT CONTRADICTION TO A PRIOR NARRATIVE OF HILLARY CLINTON AND THE HRC CAMPAIGN The Breitbart News coverage concludes with this gem: “.... Also, try to contain your surprise, but Clinton and her campaign have been lying about when she started using her homebrew email server. These new emails between her and Petraeus ‘start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private email address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 emails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.’... The laughable ‘frequently asked questions’ page produced by Clinton’s campaign claims she didn’t start using the homebrew server until March 18, 2009.”

UPDATE: THE “NY TIMES WEIGHS-IN WITH A CLEAR DISCUSSION OF HILLARY CLINTON’S ‘PETRAEUS E-MAILS’ PROBLEMS” EDITION

LATEST DISCLOSURES BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HILLARY CLINTON’S E-MAILS MAKES HER PRIOR STATEMENTS ABOUT HER E-MAILS PROBLEMATIC

ACCORDING TO MICHAEL S SCHMIDT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES — SOME OF THE NEWLY DISCLOSED CLINTON-PATREAUS E-MAILS WERE SENT FROM HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE E-MAIL ACCOUNT — THAT FACT “RAISES NEW QUESTIONS” ABOUT HRC’S STATEMENTS ABOUT HAVING TURNED OVER ALL HER WORK-RELATED E-MAILS; AND ALSO THE TIME WHEN SHE SAID SHE BEGAN USING HER PRIVATE E-MAIL ACCOUNT

According to the NY Times coverage of this story, "A string of emails that has been provided to the State Department raises new questions about whether Hillary Rodham Clinton has accurately described her use of a personal account when she was secretary of state.... Mrs. Clinton has said that she retained no emails from her first two months in office because she used an account that she no longer has access to. She has said that on March 19, 2009, she began using the personal account — hdr22@clintonemail.com — that she relied on for the rest of her time in office.... But on Friday, State Department officials said they had been given copies of an email chain between Mrs. Clinton and David H. Petraeus, the commander of United States Central Command at the time, that shows that Mrs. Clinton was using the hdr22@clintonemail.com account by Jan. 28, 2009.... The chain, with emails from Jan. 10, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2009, was provided to the State Department by its inspector general and by the Defense Department, according to State Department officials....” ( See “String of Emails Raises Questions About When Hillary Clinton Began Using Personal Account” by Michael S. Schmidt, 9/25/15, NY Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/us/politics/string-of-emails-raises-questions-about-when-hillary-clinton-began-using-personal-account.html?_r=0]).

The Schmidt-NY Times article also noted that, “.... Mrs. Clinton has said publicly and in a court filing under oath that she gave the State Department last year all of the 30,000 work-related emails in her possession. It is not clear why she never provided the newly discovered email chain to the State Department or why she said she did not begin using the hdr22@clintonemail.com account until two months after she took office.... A spokesman for her presidential campaign declined to comment....”

And the Timesman continued with this: “.... Mrs. Clinton first addressed in March the issue of when she began using the account. On the same day that she held a news conference at the United Nations to address the account, her office released a nine-page document that said that “before March 18, 2009, Secretary Clinton continued using the email account she had used during her Senate service.” It added that “she, however, no longer had access to these emails once she transitioned” to using hdr22@clintonemail.com.... In a statement filed under oath in federal court in August, Mrs. Clinton said she had given the State Department all of the work-related emails on the personal account. “I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done,” Mrs. Clinton said in the filing.... But the State Department had said in June that all or part of 15 work-related emails sent or received by Mrs. Clinton were not among the emails she gave to the department last year....”

About Me

I formerly have commented on various political blogs concerning Republican politics. Although the focus of my political commentary has been on the Brooklyn GOP and other aspects of politics in Brooklyn, I have also posted commentary about national matters.
If you wish to contact Galewyn Massey directly, please, Email to galewynmasban@gmail.com